by Richard Farr
“How many?” Lorna repeated. “How many suns?”
“Our history books are missing a zero, Dr. Chen. Not seven thousand. Seventy thousand. And the I’iwa have been in these mountains, carefully hiding themselves and some other remarkable things, for most of that time.”
“That’s rubbish,” Jimmy said. “Humans first migrated to Australia forty or fifty thousand years ago. At the most. And they didn’t get to New Guinea until well after that. If you’re trying to tell us a small albino tribe has been living up there in a cave for sixty thousand years, you’re hallucinating.”
Mayo pulled open his shirt again. “I wasn’t hallucinating the spear, was I? No more than Iona Maclean was. As for the dates for human migration, you’re right. But I can give you a better date: fifty-three thousand, to be exact. And I know that because the I’iwa themselves appear to have recorded the event. You see, the I’iwa were already here by then.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Call it the Stone Age Collapse, if you like. Maybe Partridge could write a book about it. As many as a dozen different human species were wiped out, as the Architects intended. The Neanderthals were almost wiped out, and they went extinct not much later. The Denisovans likewise. Then there’s Homo floresiensis—the hobbits.”
“The so-called hobbits survived on the island of Flores until ten or twelve thousand years ago,” Jimmy said. “Or a lot more recently than that, if you take local legends seriously. The villagers on Flores were talking about the little hairy people who lived in the forest, the ebu gogo, until only a century ago.”
“I know,” Mayo said. “A remnant population of Homo floresiensis. They would have been the very last surviving part of a huge, multispecies experiment—the true, original Babel, at which the Architects were trying to cook up just the recipe they needed—”
“So my mother was right,” Kit whispered.
“—except that the ebu gogo have been upstaged. You see, the I’iwa are very much alive today. Right up there in these mountains. And they’re not Homo sapiens either.”
CHAPTER 20
OFF THE MAP
As we made for the edge of the clearing, Isbet was still carrying her baby in the bilum bag. He was a boy, but he didn’t seem to have a name yet. I couldn’t believe she was planning to bring him with us on so dangerous an adventure—but what other option did she have? At the edge of the village, I found out: as if by invisible signal, a woman near Oma’s age came out of a hut. She was wearing a shapeless, stained cotton dress. Not Isbet’s mother—she had died years ago, before we even came to the Tainu. This woman had a lined, tragic face, and barely looked at us. She exchanged a few words with Oma, then unshouldered a bag almost identical to Isbet’s. They swapped. The new bag was full of food.
“Dolon ka’unaret,” Isbet said as we moved on. It meant husband-mother.
The path Oma chose was almost flat, to begin with. Oma and Isbet were at the front, with you an eager pace behind, almost stepping on their heels. Kit and I followed you, a few yards back. Dog didn’t have a place in the line; it moved so much faster than the humans that it kept disappearing ahead of Oma, only to show up mysteriously behind you, or by my side, before vanishing into the trees again.
Jimmy and Lorna were behind us—and falling farther behind, with Mayo prodding them along from the back, so Kit and I had a small bubble of privacy. One of the many things on my mind was what she’d said, or not said, about Rosko; about half a dozen times, I opened my mouth to ask her about it then didn’t. Instead I made small talk about New Guinea—history, tribes, languages, oh, Kit, look at this cool flower. She put up with it for a while and then flashed me a look that said, What are you really thinking about?
“You said you had an argument with Rosko. But not an argument.”
“Yes.”
I counted our paces while she failed to say anything else: ten, fifteen, twenty.
“And you keep putting off telling me anything else.”
“Sorry.”
Ten, fifteen, twenty.
“Difficult to know how to say,” she said. “But I try. When we are all together, Rosko is easy, yah? Relaxed kind of guy, nice guy, no drama, maybe a little, what do you say, difficult for read?”
“Hard to read. Go on.”
“I feel awkward from him before, but is much worse after you leave for Hawaii. I was kind of glad I had to take Daniel back to Seattle. I couldn’t make him out. I thought he—”
Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.
“I knew it is something about attraction. Romance. Sex. I think, maybe he is confused. Or maybe even he is attracted to Daniel—but I know that’s not right. So, what? He is into me? Like Daniel was—kind of hanging around me like puppy and stupid straight boy so not getting it? But I don’t think this either. Then we get back to Seattle, and guess what but Ella is there waiting with too much the cosmetics and tongue hanging out, and poor Rosko not maybe making best choices. He has thing with her.”
“That sounds like a terrible idea for both of them.”
“Only lasts maybe twenty-four hours, but yah, sure—she is crying in my lap, and angry, and he won’t talk. You know I don’t maybe like Ella so much, but I say to him, hey, Rosko, you have totally hurt her feelings, what the hell is this?”
“Typical boy,” I said. “He doesn’t know what he wants, so he gives up trying to work it out and goes for the first available distraction.”
“No. Is not that, Majka. He knows exactly what he wants. He gets involved with Ella to try to distract himself from person he wants, because thinking about the person he does want, and can’t have, is driving him crazy.”
“Who, Kit? I can’t think of anyone else he’s ever seemed remotely—”
“You know what? Rosko is good-looking I guess, but he says to me, ‘I feel that I know what it’s like to be a very ugly person. There’s only one person I ever felt mentally and emotionally in tune with, only one person I ever really wanted to, you know, be with. And that person looks right through me. That person has never even imagined seeing me the way I want to be seen, and never will.’ So of course I say, Rosko, you can’t know that. And he says, yes, Kit, I can. It’s just something I have to accept and put up with.”
“Who, Kit? Spit it out.”
She stopped in the middle of the path and looked at me with a strange kind of compassion, as if she pitied me for not understanding. Jimmy and Lorna were just a few paces behind us.
“You, Majka. You. He said, ‘I dream about her all the time.’ Then he started crying. I never saw him cry before. And he can’t stop apologizing to me, because he thinks I will be angry.”
Lorna stopped because we were standing in the way. “Ye best close yer mouth, or you’ll be gettin’ mozzie bites on yer tongue,” she said. “What’s the big surprise?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Aye, nothin’, Morag, sure. Yer jawbone is trailin’ in the mud, an’ if it’s nothin’, I’m Joan of Arc. Never mind. None o’ my beeswax, aye?”
“Keep moving,” Mayo said.
The first climb came after that. Only a couple of hundred feet, but then we lost fifty, gained another two hundred, lost another hundred. It shouldn’t have seemed difficult, but it was midmorning and the humidity was already extraordinary.
“My blood’s thinned,” Jimmy said at a water stop. “I’d forgotten how exhausting this is.”
“After what you go through in Iraq?” Kit said. “Should be resting in hotel, not hiking in wild place.”
“We’ll be fine, Kit.”
Fine? I wasn’t confident that they’d survive even the next uphill slope. They’d gone back to Iraq looking fit for forty-five, but their ordeal in the desert had aged them both by decades. Just getting to the Tainu village had left them looking drained, and I felt stupid and guilty for involving them in this. Pure selfishness—I’d wanted to see them and hadn’t been prepared to wait any longer. So here they were, sweating their way up a forest trail, and if that wasn’t eno
ugh guilt for one morning, I was also wasting a lot of energy trying to suppress the idea that I was pissed off with them for slowing us down.
We entered denser vegetation, and the muffled green gloom became suffocating. All of us, except Oma and Isbet, had clothes soaked through with sweat. You, at least, were tireless: skin and bone, maybe, but I could see all that old mountain-man-rugged-dude energy surging back into you, as if you were too intent on the task to be aware of physical discomfort. Meanwhile Oma and Isbet, barefoot and scarcely clothed, didn’t have a drop of sweat on their bodies, and they kept walking placidly, never varying their pace, as if no effort was involved. When Oma did stop, it was as if he’d turned to stone: he stood slightly knock-kneed, his toes splayed in the mud, his empty, big-knuckled hands held out at his sides as if weighing something invisible, and the only motion was an almost imperceptible waving of his fingertips, like kelp in a current. Sometimes he’d raise one hand, vaguely indicating a direction. Then Isbet would say a few words to him, words that often didn’t make sense to me even though I could translate them: shallow now; it’s darker on the left side; long scratches high up. Or she’d give a rapid-fire list of five, eight, ten plant names. She was painting word-pictures for him. Most of his replies were a single word, or a grunt, or he’d simply touch her arm. Then he’d pick a direction, grab Isbet by the hand or elbow, and launch himself uphill in some new direction.
Toward the end of the morning, in the worst of the heat, the path narrowed and turned even more steeply uphill. We climbed almost continually for two hours until we were working our way along a scree line at the bottom of a cliff. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw people looking down at us from above; I made the connection just as I heard Kit’s sharp intake of breath.
“Dolon te akim, biu!” Isbet said, smiling cheerfully. Here is my husband, the third one along. She raised her hand toward the row of seated figures, greeting him. I wondered whether he could offer us any protection.
We dropped a thousand feet to a soup-green river, forded the river, and gained more elevation than we’d lost in an especially brutal path on the other side. In some places we had to pull ourselves up using whatever loose roots or other handholds we could find.
“Uket minai’a bek?” Isbet said at last. This is where we were before. Remember?
I recognized the place too. “She’s right,” I said to Kit. “They had a temporary camp we stayed at, just over there. We’re only an hour from the waterfall now.”
“Yes,” Lorna said. And threw up.
“You all right?”
“Fine, fine. Feelin’ dizzy is all.”
I wanted to believe her. But the afternoon was worse than the morning by far. More climbing. Clouds of sweat bees. Not a breath of wind. And heat that just kept building and building. She threw up again.
“Emdem. Jaa amt eyam, ipol enatak,” Isbet said to me. Which meant, roughly: Don’t worry. Soon the world will rain, and then its coolness will enter us.
“Kam apa ipol, otala re em,” I said. We will welcome the rain into us.
Welcome turned out to be optimistic.
The waterfall was spectacular. Part of an underground river system, it unraveled like a bolt of white silk and plunged one hundred feet from a tall slab of limestone to where we stood. The area directly beneath it boiled and growled through a series of pools, but there were shallow areas even I didn’t mind standing in, and the falling water was a natural air conditioner. Jimmy, Lorna, and Kit stood near me, knee deep, splashing their faces and enjoying the relief from the heat.
I tried to enjoy the moment. But Mayo was standing dangerously close to the place where the water came down, muttering fiercely to himself, and Oma and Isbet had huddled together by a tree about as far from the water as they could get, looking tense and deep in conversation. I watched them, wondering what they were saying.
Kit plucked my sleeve. “Daniel,” she said, and pointed toward the cliff path. You’d already started up it, and were almost halfway to the top. You looked back, hanging on to a small tree, clearly impatient for us to follow.
“Come on,” she said. I waved to the others and hurried after her.
By the time we got to the top, you were standing—like a statue on its plinth—in the middle of the rounded rock that Iona had described to us when she returned, pale and frightened, from her solo hike. Even though she’d told us it was strange, there was still something shocking about it. Not just round, but perfectly round; not just smooth, but with a surface as flawless as paper. Maybe three feet across and a foot thick with a subtly tapered edge, it looked like a piece of abstract modern art turned out on a lathe.
“She said the ax was here,” Jimmy shouted over the roar of the water, pointing at your feet. But there was no strange gift waiting for us this time. Only a wall of green, with a small opening at the point farthest from the water. Mayo pointed to it.
“This is the way we went,” he said. We crawled through what amounted to a tunnel in the vegetation, then left the trees below as we climbed a ridge. It turned into a rill of exposed rock, arcing above the surrounding tree canopy like the back of a dragon. Near the top we passed through a thin cloud layer. Distant ridges came into view.
A whole new level of stillness and awareness seemed to come over Oma then. I’d assumed he was simply finding his way, aiming for a particular place, but there was more to it than that. He was closing in on something. Bending low, he felt for the rocks, and every time he came to a significant outcropping he stopped, crouched, and sniffed.
Isbet could see I was puzzled. Caves, she said in Tain’iwa. Air currents move through them. But the caves near the volcano smell different. Those caves are where the I’iwa live.
Kit rolled her eyes at me. “This not looking so much the volcano country to me,” she said, after I’d translated. I was about to agree with her when you put your hand on my arm.
“There,” you said. You were pointing to a spot on the horizon between two peaks. It was maybe five miles away, and another thousand feet above us. “Smoke.”
“Is cloud, Daniel,” Kit said. “Is just cloud.”
But Isbet shook her head. “Tolim eh,” she said. He’s right.
“Not far now, then,” Jimmy said. He was talking to Lorna, trying to encourage her, ignoring the absurdity of this alleged volcano, five hundred miles west of where New Guinea’s active volcanoes were supposed to be. I could hear her wheezing. We continued, but a few steps later, just before a steep drop-off, you stopped and looked up, a hand held out.
“Rain.”
Kit wiped her face with a bandana and looked up at the uninterrupted blue sky. “No, Daniel, I don’t think so. Maybe later.” But I’d got used to assuming that whatever you said was either true or about to be true. We paused for thirty seconds, feeling the sweat trickle over us, feeling the heat of the air on the insides of our mouths, listening to the electric crackle of the insects. To one side, a small brown stream ran twenty feet below us.
Oma held his face and arms up in a dramatic gesture and muttered, waving a hand. “Trum kel omin,” Isbet said to me. He wants us to hurry. Oma began to pick his way down ahead of us. He was crouching, using his fingers and toes to feel his way across the fractured surface, like someone reading braille. Dog scampered back and forth between us, as if trying to help or make us move faster. Jimmy and Lorna had taken up a position right ahead of me. She must have put her foot on a loose stone: she slid sideways with a little ai of surprise.
“No!” Jimmy cried, and lunged at her. He caught her sleeve, but all that did was pull him off balance too. He spun, fell backward, and hit a finger of rock that ripped the pack from his shoulders. Both of them tumbled toward the stream.
Dog got to them first. Jimmy was lying faceup on the stream bank, motionless. Lorna, thigh deep in mud the color of baby poop, was swearing a blue streak while struggling to extricate herself and get to him. “Och, ye clumsy eejit, Lorna,” she was saying to herself. “Why can ye nae luik where yer p
uttin’ yer feck’n feet? Jimmy, are ye a’right? Talk to me, man.”
Jimmy was a’right, sort of. His shirt was ripped open, and he had rock rash all over his back; otherwise he was just badly winded. When he recovered, we discovered that Lorna was the bigger problem. She seemed fine, apart from ruined dignity and a grazed arm. But she cried out when we tried to lift her from the muck.
“Knee,” she said. “Right feck’n knee.”
I bathed away some of the mud and used a knife to cut open the leg of her trousers. There was no visible wound, but she couldn’t stand on it.
“Well, this’ll sure slow us down,” she said.
“It won’t slow us down,” Mayo said. He’d picked his way down much more slowly and only just arrived on the scene. “We can’t afford for it to slow us down. You’re not going to make it, so you’ll have to go back.”
“We’ll see about that,” she said. Translation: Start givin’ me orders, ye great Aussie git, an’ I’ll break yer nose.
It felt odd to agree with Mayo, but he was right. “We don’t have much more light,” I said. “We’ll have to camp here. And your knee isn’t the only problem. Jimmy’s back is an infection waiting to happen.”
Lorna scowled at me. I unpacked the first-aid kit and threw you a tarp to put up. I was cleaning Jimmy’s back when you said “Rain” again. Seconds later it began to drizzle. Seconds after that, the drizzle turned into a violent, wind-blown torrent.
It was like having a swimming pool thrown at us. In minutes, my skin went from unpleasantly hot to unpleasantly cold. You followed the lead of Isbet and her father, simply squatting with your backs to a fallen log as if determined to remain motionless however long it lasted. Jimmy and I got a tarp strung up and moved everyone under it. Because nobody could bother to deal with the cooker, Kit and I produced a dinner consisting of chunks of cold Spam knifed onto crackers.
